SIXTY SIX YEAR LATER IRVING ROTH REUNITES WITH RICK CARRIER WHO LIBERATED HIM FROM BUCHENWALD
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/05/irving-roth-holocaust-survivor-rick-carrier-soldier-liberator-reunion_n_1129673.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%7C117864
Sixty-six years after Rick Carrier liberated Irving Roth from the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, the two men have been reunited for the first time in New York.
Roth, who was taken to Auschwitz at just 14-years-old and later transferred to Buchenwald, met 20-year-old Carrier when General George Patton’s Third Army liberated the camp near Weimar, Germany, WABC-TV reports.
5min.com‘He Brought Me Back to Life’
Carrier, 86, and Roth, 82, were reunited by March of the Living, a Jewish-history awareness group that exposes Jewish youth to historic sites and Holocaust survivors in an effort to educate them about the Holocaust and the birth of Israel.
Carrier discovered the camp while looking for a supply dump on April 10, 1945, he told WABC’s Diana Williams.
The next day, he helped liberate the prisoners. Roth, who weighed a mere 75 pounds at the time, was among them.
“You see a lot of stuff in war,” Carrier told the New York Daily News. “But I never saw anything like this, people starving behind barbed wires, dressed in these flimsy striped pajamas.”
“It was important that I meet Rick Carrier again,” Roth told the Daily News. “He brought me back to life.”
An estimated 230,000 prisoners were brought to Buchenwald between 1938 and 1945. Of those, as many as 56,000 are believed to have been killed.
At the time Buchenwald was liberated, Nazi Germany was already on the brink of collapse. The Germans would surrender less than one month later, on May 7. Hermann Pister, the commandant of Buchenwald, was hanged for his crimes in 1948.
For more on the reunion, watch the video report above.
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